


Faded

by distractionpie



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Artist Jean Kirstein, Canonical Character Death, Close Relationship - Gen or Romantic Unspecified, Gen, Grief/Mourning, JeanMarco Week 2020, M/M, Reflection, unspecified time period
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:40:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24873991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/distractionpie/pseuds/distractionpie
Summary: It's the absences which hurt most, looking back, but Jean wished he hadn't been so determined to erase his mistake.
Relationships: Marco Bott & Jean Kirstein, Marco Bott/Jean Kirstein
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14
Collections: JeanMarco Week 2020





	Faded

Sasha.

Connie.

Armin.

Ymir, Connie, and Sasha.

Franz and Hannah.

Historia.

Mikasa, Mikasa, Mikasa.

Eren, comically exaggerated.

Daz, Thomas, and Tom, all towering over a seated Bertholdt.

Armin and Reiner.

Milieus.

Annie and Mina.

Page after page after page of familiar faces. Some lost to titans or treachery, some just changed by time.

And every now and again, a page torn out completely.

Jean doesn’t do that anymore, but this sketchbook is old, he’d filled it up during the winter before graduation, and he’d been a different person back then, a boy who’d know so little of loss that he hadn’t hesitated to throw memories away.

The pictures are all that are left, imperfect renderings of a more innocent time.

There was Sasha, eyes too wide, and Armin, jaw too narrow, Jean had always had talent but he’d been young and self taught and sometimes pencils snapped and smudged or pages were creased where dorm-mates had snatched the pad for a closer look.

He hadn’t been pursuing perfection, not steadfastly, not seriously. What did it matter, if Ymir wasn't quite that much taller than Eren or if, more practised at drawing peers, the version of Shadis captured on the page looked like an old man rather than one of middling years because Jean had over-done the frown lines?

He’d never minded a few flaws, because who among them was flawless?

But Marco’s flaw had been that he was impossible to draw. Jean had tried, there were more ripped pages than this notepad could hold that testified to that, but every attempt came out dead-eyed and flat a mirror image with no ounce of soul behind it; or it felt good when he was drawing, lively and bright, but the finished product was a childish mess of uneven lines and poorly proportioned features.

He’d joked once that Marco owed him for the supplies he’d squandered on such a troublesome fact. Seven months later, Marco had gifted him a brown paper wrapped tin of paints on his birthday. Jean had sulked a full week because friends ought to give friends real presents and what did it mean for what he’d thought had been between them if Marco was just fulfilling an obligation? Marco had laughed, when he’d finally coaxed the truth out of Jean, reminded him that Marco’s honour would never have let a real debt stand so long if he thought he owed somebody recompense and that Jean had never used paints at camp anyway so they could have nothing to do with any of his previously wasted material. He’d tried to preserve the memory of that smile later while it was still fresh, in tentative strokes of paint, and he’d thrown three unsatisfying attempts away before resolving to reserve the precious resource for subjects that might offer more success.

Perhaps if they'd made it to the military police, there’d have been art supplies among Sina’s luxuries and he could have found the medium that he needed. If things had gone even more differently still, perhaps he could have captured Marco with one of those strange Marleyan photo-graph machines, which wouldn’t have been quite the same as putting his Marco to page as art but would still have been something to hold onto.

Because Jean has lived and lived and and with long years came the fading of memories, and those who hadn’t made it this far he kept fresh with the versions of themselves preserved on yellowing pages, but he’d never managed a Marco who matched up to his Marco, and now he doesn’t have even that. Years have flattered Jean’s recollection of his eyes down to a nonspecific brown, and Jean can’t count the freckles that spanned Marco’s cheekbones when from memory to memory they scatter differently.

All he has are the frayed edges of what he’d been too foolish to hold onto.


End file.
